We all need healthy love in our lives to thrive and find joy. Yet, abuse survivors are conditioned to confuse abuse with love. We don’t recognize healthy love when it walks in the door. Healthy love feels uncomfortable and unfamiliar. We reject exactly what we yearn to embrace.

After my relationship with the judge ended, it took me a very long time to discover that respect is love. It has taken me even longer to reconnect with this passage from Corinthians which is so often quoted at weddings and too often forgotten shortly after the rice is thrown.

On this sixth anniversary of Navigating Uncharted Waters, it seemed a great way to thank my nearly 600,000 visitors from every country in the world. I never, ever dreamed when I started this site that it would bring so many wonderful people into my life or that it would weather the storms which nearly caused it to sink.

Anne Caroline Drake and Eve Ensler

The only way for women to stay safe is to speak up.
– Eve Ensler

As y’all know, I’m a huge fan of Eve Ensler. This year her One Billion Rising (OBR) theme is Revolution: Drum, Dance, Rise! OBR shared the stories of extraordinary activists who embody the creative radical shift in consciousness required to bring about CHANGE. On my blog in 2015, I will be joining this movement. I plan to invest considerable time and energy in researching and writing the stories of courageous survivors who have gone on to thrive and find joy.

Let’s drum. Let’s dance. Let us rise in a global revolution against violence against women and children!

Elizabeth Gilbert is the quintessenial role model for leveraging a person's talents to learn how to survive, thrive, and find joy. When life handed her the lemons of a bitter divorce, she squeezed those lemons into the stratosphere of best-selling books. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia was on th […]

Physical abuse is no longer just about bruises and broken bones. Emotional abuse is about more than hurt feelings. The long-term health impacts of domestic violence (DV) are being characterized as "epidemic" and a "national scourge" by Robert S. Thompson, MD, because DV affects between 25% and 54% of women in their adult lifetimes, and a […]

The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self by Julia Cameron is a fabulous book and a 12-week fantastic experience. I've done the course twice. At the end of my first course, the other participants created a protection circle for me. It was a life-altering experience to be in th […]